A new cabinet or fresh parliamentary elections?

Dubai: Kuwait's Ruler will not dissolve the Gulf state's parliament, its speaker said on Tuesday after meeting with the head of state amid tensions with the house that pushed the Cabinet to tender its resignation.

With the dissolution of parliament off the table, there are two options left for the Emir, Shaikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Sabah. He can either form a new Cabinet or call for fresh parliamentary elections. But forming a new Cabinet will only provide a short-term solution to the shaky democratic experiment that is the Kuwaiti parliament, according to experts.

"Although the grilling would have been avoided without a constitutional crisis, problems like this would likely occur," Nathan Brown, an expert on Arab constitution and democratisation at the Washington DC-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Gulf News.

Catch 22

However, there is a catch 22 situation if the Emir chooses to go for early parliamentary elections.

"New elections would probably not produce a drastically different parliament," Brown explained.

The more likely option, according to Brown, would be for the Emir to form a new Cabinet, although suspending the constitution and the parliament is becoming an increasingly real option.

The fundamental problem for Kuwait is that its government is split over a system of parliamentary democracy.

"This looks like many European political systems a century ago," Brown said.

However, the parliament of Kuwait is not completely without purpose - it represents society but a more diverse society has begun to produce problems for the government, according to Brown.

"Kuwait is composed of merchant families, city dwellers, secularists, tribalists, Salafis, Shiites, nationalists, Islamists and so on, so it's no wonder that it is hard to put together any governing majority," he said.